I'm a pharmacologist, freelance science and medical writer, educator, and speaker with a passion for public understanding of science and medicine. I earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology and therapeutics from the University of Florida and a B.S. in toxicology from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science. I report on all things pharmaceutical and scientific from the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina.

***Final update, Saturday July 19: The International AIDS Society issued a statement (PDF) following the release of the MH17 passenger manifest by Malaysia Airlines. The IAS has formally confirmed that a total of six delegates – not 100+ – perished in the July 17 crash.***

As an undergraduate research intern at then-SmithKline & French Laboratories, I recall my advisor and other lab directors trying to work out their various flights to England to visit the company’s Welwyn Garden City operations. The issue at hand was the company’s limitation that no more than two principal investigators could travel on the same flight, a precaution to preserve R&D progress in the event of a tragedy.

We learned late last night that such concerns may be eclipsed manifold by the tragic news equivalent to losing hundreds of years of broad expertise in combatting HIV/AIDS.

Many HIV/AIDS researchers, officials, and activists – perhaps scores – had been traveling on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 en route to the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

The MH17 Boeing 777 aircraft was apparently shot down yesterday over Ukraine, perhaps accidentally, killing all 298 passengers and crew.

***Final update, Saturday July 19: The International AIDS Society issued a statement (PDF) following the release of the MH17 passenger manifest by Malaysia Airlines. The IAS has formally confirmed that a total of six delegates – not 100+ – perished in the July 17 crash.***

While we await confirmation of the magnitude of this loss, the premature death of any one individual among the anticipated 14,000 attendees is a blow for the international effort to reduce human suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Current IAS President, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi from Institute Pasteur, appeared in a press conference in Canberra yesterday, now posted at The Australian. Barré-Sinoussi shared half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Luc Montagnier for the discovery of the retrovirus that causes AIDS. (The other half of that prize went to Harald zur Hausen, the German scientist whose group showed that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer, enabling development of HPV vaccines.)

Before the Australian National Press Club, Barré-Sinoussi reflected solemnly,

“I apologize if I don’t feel so well. On that plane, it was probably many passengers coming to the AIDS Conference in Melbourne. It will be a great loss for the HIV/AIDS community including, if it is confirmed, our colleague Joep Lange (pronounced yoop lahn-guh) and collaborator Jacquile [Jacqueline van Tongeren, Lange's partner and mother of their five children] I had the privilege myself to work with them in the past. Joep was a wonderful person and a great professional. But more than that, a wonderful human being.”

Lange had preceded Barré-Sinoussi as IAS president.

The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach confirmed in a call to Lange’s Amsterdam office that the AIDS researcher had indeed perished in the crash. Harvard’s Daniel R. Kuritzkes, M.D., described Lange as an “extraordinary leader, scientist, and humanitarian,” who, “fought ceaselessly for the dignity of all HIV-infected persons throughout the world.”

Hosts and compatriots in mourning

Australia appears to have lost 28 citizens among the 298 who perished on MH17, including 10 passengers from the state of Victoria. So, the capital city of Melbourne is not only the host city for those who mourn their international colleagues, but also a compatriot.

“There is no greater test of character for a city, than how they respond to a tragedy such as this. Proud to be a Melburnian. #MH17#AIDS2014“

I’m hesitant to repeat any other social media reports of AIDS 2014 delegates lost on the flight pending release of the passenger manifest by Malaysian Airlines. As of midnight Friday Malaysian time, only the names of the pilot and crew had been released.

But in addition to Drs. Lange and van Tongeren, Nature’s Declan Butler and Katia Moskvitch have confirmed the deaths of four other prominent meeting delegates:

The ultimate toll might very well have been higher for another reason: Emirates Airlines been selected by the IAS as the official carrier for the conference. It’s conceivable that some travelers took advantage of the meeting discounts for their air travel.

Infectious diseases journalist Maryn McKenna remarked last night that the crash brought back memories of the 1998 Swissair Flight 111 crash and loss of WHO director of global AIDS research, Jonathan Mann, M.D., and his wife and AIDS researcher, Mary Lou Clements-Mann. Flight 111 crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia en route to Geneva from New York’s JFK Airport.

Eerily, Irving Sigal, Merck’s then director of molecular biology and leader of the team developing their HIV protease inhibitor, Crixivan (indinavir), perished in the Pan Am Flight 131 flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

I’ll update this post as more information becomes available.

For more health and pharmaceutical news and commentary, follow me on Twitter @DavidKroll, or here at Forbes.com.

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These weapons were actively used and are being use in the area between Saur-Mogila held by the rebels and Amvrosiivka held by Ukrainian Army. Knowing all that why would you direct civilian aircrafts full of European Citizens over the area where they knew up to ten fighter planes and one large cargo plane were either hit or shut down in the period of about two weeks? Rebels might have shut down the plane but they are shooting down all planes which enter that particular air space that was made clear to Ukrainian government long time ago, this might have been an accident on the part of the rebels but allowing civilian aircraft to fly to that zone was certainly not an accident on the part of Ukrainian government.

In 2001, in the skies over the Black Sea anti-aircraft missile S-200, released during the military exercises of the Ukrainian army, struck Tu-154M “Siberia.” Airliner was Flight 1812 from Tel Aviv – Novosibirsk. All 66 passengers and 12 crew members were killed.

Malaysian “777″ went off course by tens of kilometers not long before he fell near the border of Ukraine and Russia. Three days ago the same flight from Amsterdam – Kuala Lumpur flying over eastern Ukraine through special air corridor for civil aviation. Modern programs available to everyone, allow you to track the movement of civilian flights. Anyone could see the strange circumstance: July 14 flight flew through the Donetsk region much further south.

On July 15 there were again recorded only small deviations from the normal path of the flight in the sky over India. And on Wednesday, the plane was flying, as usual, through Germany and Poland, and in Ukraine much farther south than the day of the disaster.

July 17, as the flight tracker shows, is the first time airliner is flying through areas of active hostilities. LifeNews interviewed experts argue that any such change should have been coordinated with the route supervisory authority. In Ukraine, it is called “Aeroruh.” This office had no immediate comment on catastrophe, which killed hundreds of people.

Below you can see exactly how flight path was changed or plane was allowed to proceed without deviation leading it in to kill zone. If it is true and many international flights from Europe were allowed to proceed through that particular area then in essence Kiev could have been simply waiting and gambling with lives of unsuspecting Europeans hoping for the rebels to mistaken one of these planes for the military plane and fire on it and when they did not they could have fired on it themselves with the same type of equipment they know rebels to have. One thing is certain they did not prevent planes from flying over this high intensity combat zone utilizing tanks, heavy artillery, grad, smerch, uragan, CAY, PTUR FAGOT units, PZRK low flying anti-aircraft rockets. Grad alone has a top range of about 40 kilometers and we are not event talking about smerch and uragan these things are capable of taking down a high-rise with one shot, I have included some links below for grad, smerch, uragan and PZRK, check out the angle on grand, smerch, uragan and PZRK.